Telesat Ka2 Satellite Traffic Management Policy

Our goal is to ensure that each Xplornet customer receives fair and consistent access to the Internet. Bandwidth (the amount of data that can be transmitted and received) is shared among everyone who is connected to the network. Peer-to-peer applications, video streaming and large file downloads can disproportionately use up that bandwidth. If this happens, it can crowd out web browsing, email and other types of web traffic. Traffic management helps to ensure that all of our customers receive a good online experience.

Xplornet’s Internet Traffic Management Policies are described below. While these policies may affect the transfer speed of certain traffic in certain circumstances, these policies will not cause your transfer speed to fall below 100 kbps.

Traffic management policies in effect may change in the event of maintenance, testing, outages or unforeseen network-impacting events.

Application Balancing

On your service there is an application balancing policy which operates any time network congestion is detected. This dynamic policy responds to congestion in a part of the network when bandwidth of all customers using the network resource at that time has reached the service capacity of that resource. For example, the policy works to leave resources open for data applications such as voice calling or web browsing that could be crowded out entirely by a large data-intensive download during a congested period. This approach allows more customers to continue their online activities and reduces the impact of data intensive applications on light data applications during congested periods.

To minimize the effects of congestion on certain types of applications, our systems assign applications to one of four categories:

Category

Application Type

One

Voice calling (Voice over IP)

Domain Name System (DNS) and network management

Least impacted by congestion

Two

Web browsing

Social networking

Online Gaming

Three

All traffic types not assigned to categories one, two or four which includes among other types: web video, video streaming and most encrypted traffic

Four

App downloads and software updates

Cloud storage and backup services

File transfer applications

Peer-to-peer file sharing applications

Newsgroup/Usenet

Most impacted by congestion

What this means: At busy times, we work to ensure that a good experience is maintained for Internet phone calls, web browsing and social networking.

Monthly Data Quota

Every service package currently offered by Xplornet includes a monthly data quota. The system counts all data, both upload and download, that passes to and from the Internet through our network towards the monthly data quota. This quota varies based on the package to which you subscribe.

To confirm the current monthly data quota on your package and the data you have used this billing cycle, please log into MyXplornet and click on the Usage Tracker.

If you are not an Xplornet customer, please see Our Internet Packages for the monthly data quota applicable to available plans in your area.